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Maemo on N900 refused 3D drivers b/c of the closed-source reason. Ubuntu made it big with great 3D on closed drivers before they became open, so I'd think the same will happen in mobile.
Since Mir (as opposed to SurfaceFlinger) provides C/C++ bindings to these 3D drivers, we can finally get the most out of ARM hardware.

Erm... Really? No pvr binaries on N900? That's news to me, and i guess to a lot of people. Makes me wonder what Oliver McFadden ported q3a to gles for then. Feel free to back that claim up, right now.

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The system had access to 3D drivers, but nothing (stock) really used them: No compositing or hardware-based rendering. It was also very difficult to find applications to use them. So yes, a driver to develop against did exist, but there was exceedingly little development against it.

Comment

The system had access to 3D drivers, but nothing (stock) really used them: No compositing or hardware-based rendering. It was also very difficult to find applications to use them. So yes, a driver to develop against did exist, but there was exceedingly little development against it.

That's incorrect. hildon-desktop (the window manager/compositor) used the GPU.

It's true that most apps didn't make use of the GPU, mainly because the toolkit of choice was gtk+ which was not a good match for GPUs. There was also a serious lack of time/resources to fix the buggy drivers.

AFAIK that's pretty much similar to how Android did things before the 4.x releases, ie. most apps are sw rendered, and the GPU is only used for compositing and 3D games.